Articles & Reviews

Buckley Ceramics in the Seventeenth Century:
Socio-Economic Status of the Potters and Possible Design Influences

Christine Longworth

Abstract

Buckley in North Wales was associated with the production of pottery from the medieval period to the mid twentieth century. The most productive time was in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Potters at this time were low in the social scale, often unmentioned in contemporary sources. Buckley potters fit into this low socio-economic group where they eked out a living on the margins. At this time changes in taste led to a desire to copy fashionable imported ceramics, metal wares and other materials. The pottery at Brookhill produced a wide range of vessels, including some intriguing sgraffito dishes which appear to be influenced by the medieval bestiary texts

Key words: Buckley, socio-economic status; sgraffito pottery; bestiaries; slipware designs

In the towns, documentary evidence shows that potters were at the bottom end of the social scale and were also too poor or insufficiently numerous to form a guild until almost the end of the medieval period. ² Terminology in relation to the various crafts people making table and kitchen ware, makes it difficult to determine their trade. This is because wares could be made in various materials such as wood, metal or clay. Words such as pottarius, ollarius or ollator are used equally for metal and clay potters. Le Patourel suggests that, when consulting documentary sources, the trade 'potter' should be considered a metal-worker if located in a town unless there is additional information to indicate a clay potter. In a village, one can assume that he is a clay-worker.³ On consulting printed records for larger towns, Le Patourel has been unable to find any potters' guilds. The guilds referred to as potters proved to be metal-workers.⁴

Much of late medieval potting was located in the countryside where potters often combined potting with growing crops and keeping animals.⁵ This dual occupation was also characteristic of other rural industries such as mining, cloth making and various woodland crafts.⁶ It provided some form of financial security, ensuring that they were not totally dependent on their craft for an income. The pattern of work allowed the potter to fit his production into the slack periods of the agricultural year. Ethnographic literature gives examples which show a similar pattern. The combination of both pottery making and agriculture by ethnographic groups living in marginal agricultural areas maximises their economic productivity.⁷

Potters in the medieval period were economically obscure but an indication of the distribution of the medieval potting industry can be found by examining taxation returns and other records and looking at fieldnames containing potter or crocker elements. However, this information is scattered partly due to a lack of organisation within the medieval industry and partly to the relative poverty and insignificance of its individual members.⁸ Late fourteenth century poll-tax returns studied by Le Patourel for the counties of Somerset, Sussex and West Riding of Yorkshire do not have any clay potters mentioned, although there are a large number of other trades listed. Information about potters on other documents shows that they were assessed at the lowest rate for a man and wife, the fourpence rate paid by the mass of the peasantry compared to sixpence rate paid by most small craftsmen.⁹ The family was the basic unit of production, including the children. Any larger scale operations would include the employment of three or four men.¹⁰

Pottery was distributed in the local market and would have been bought largely by the peasantry and the smaller landowners. The demands of the consumers would have had a direct influence on the quantity and type of pottery produced. The lack of change in items produced over a number of generations implies a conservatism in the taste of consumers.¹¹

End of the medieval period

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, there was a change in the structure of domestic life in the British Isles. This was partly caused by the final collapse of demesne farming, the break-up of great feudal households and the waning power of the guilds.¹² More influential was a series of economic and cultural trends developing throughout north-west Europe.¹³ Expanded trade with the continent brought in imported pottery and new ideas in eating and drinking. The traditional medieval domestic wares of wood, leather and metal were replaced by pottery and the simple ceramic forms which had continued throughout the medieval period expanded into many new wares to supply a growing domestic market in all levels of society.

This change in fashion led to a sudden increase in the number of potteries all over the country. Small potting communities established themselves in areas which had suitable raw materials; clay, fuel, water and lead.¹⁴ Their activities, such as clay digging or firing smoky kilns were unpopular, as was the fire hazard, therefore they were not encouraged to work near the larger towns and villages. They were commonly situated on waste land close to the source of their raw materials.¹⁵ An example of this is at Potovens, in West Yorkshire, where a group of potters settled immediately outside the enclosed fields of Wakefield in the Out-wood, a waste area supplied with clay, fireclay, coal, stone and water, all used by the potters in their craft.¹⁶ In the Merseyside area, suitable clays and fuels existed on the coalfields of South Lancashire and in North Wales. These were exploited by cottage potters who built domestic kilns to serve the local markets around Liverpool and Chester. Documentary evidence shows that by the middle of the seventeenth century many farmers in the St. Helens district were producing pottery and clay tobacco pipes as part of their livelihood and excavation has revealed evidence of pottery production.¹⁷

Buckley in the Seventeenth Century

By the early seventeenth century, a group of cottage potters had settled on encroachments on the common in Buckley, North Wales. Buckley is situated 12 km west of Chester at a height of 140m above sea level overlooking the River Dee estuary (fig 1).

Fig 1  North Wales and Merseyside

The area is rich in natural resources, Buckley itself lying on top of coal measures and clays. There is a major geological fault line north-south through Buckley and associated smaller faults which have exposed the range of clays and coal. The faulting caused mineralisation to take place, producing lead sulphide, the source of lead for glazing the pots.¹⁸ The potters exploited the suitable supplies of clay, fireclay, open-cast coal and nearby sources of lead. Water transport was available on the Dee Estuary, down the hill from Buckley. They utilised the wide range of clays found in the region. Red boulder clay, the most common raw material, was often mixed with a lighter buff-coloured clay to produce the domestic pottery. White clays were used in the production of clay tobacco pipes and pottery. Cooking pots and saggars were made from fireclays.

The earliest map evidence dates from the eighteenth century. An estate map entitled The Lordship of Ewlow dated 1757 gives acreages, land values, names of occupiers and buildings drawn in perspective. This map clearly illustrates the location of kilns on Buckley Common.¹⁹ Other maps from the Gwysaney Estate covering the years 1750-1781 provide information about names of occupiers, encroachments on Buckley Mountain (another name for Buckley Common), and the location of pottery kilns.²⁰ A survey carried out in 1976 identified nineteen pottery production sites in and around Buckley Common, dating from the medieval period up to 1946, when the last pottery closed.²¹

Some of the earliest documentary references to potters come from clay accounts, which provide a window on the extent of the industry. The potter had to pay for a licence to dig clay. This was usually on the moor, waste or common land.²² The earliest records for Buckley date from 1759, 'For cash received from Benjamin Codrell and others for clay raised in the Ewloe Lordship in the year 1759: £5.2s.6d.'²³

A typical Buckley pottery was small, tenanted and worked by a master potter who employed three or four men and boys.²⁴ Messham researched the clay accounts between 1783-1810 and the available estate maps and was able to produce a table to show the extent of the Buckley industry.²⁵ Very few of the families managed to make much of a success out of their potting, most being in production for only a few generations. The craft was passed on from father to son and there was much marrying within potting families. When there was no male heir to carry on the business, it passed to the widow or daughter. Messham lists three women responsible for running potteries in the late 18 th century.²⁶ This ensured the continuity for some time. The Hayes family is the most notable for its continuity. They were producing clay tobacco pipes in 1695 and the family continued making pots until 1942. After the flourishing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the two families of Catherall and Hancock became the leading producers making large quantities of utilitarian wares.

Unlike most country potters, in Buckley they worked full time at their potting. This was also the situation in Potovens in Yorkshire. Both these groups of potters fit into the low socio-economic group of rural potters found throughout the country who lived on marginal land and eked out a living using the raw materials around them and supplying their local markets.

Brookhill Pottery, Buckley

Brookhill Pottery was situated on the north side of Buckley Common, close to an exposure of clays and coal. It was in production from c1640-1720.²⁷

In medieval England, the cooking pot, jug and bowl were almost the sole products of the potter,²⁸ but by the time Brookhill was in production an extremely wide range of wares, largely modelled on Continental originals, were being made. This was the same for most potteries throughout the country. The desire to copy fashionable imported wares, metal wares, and also other materials such as wood and leather, led to the changes in pottery forms and decoration. Potters could then supply an existing demand, especially among people who aspired to more expensive items such as metal vessels but could not afford them.²⁹

One change was in the production of ceramic drinking vessels to replace wooden ones. This was partly as a result of the increase in the drinking of ale.³⁰ Brookhill potters met this demand by producing a range of dark-glazed and slip-trailed mugs, cups and jugs (figs 2 and 3).

Seventeenth century plates imitated pewter forms and edged out wooden boards and trenchers.³¹ In Brookhill these influences can be seen in the range of vessels that copy metal prototypes (figs 4 and 5) and the large quantity of slipware and press-moulded dishes that replaced wooden boards (figs 6 and 7).

The standard of wares produced in seventeenth century Buckley is low compared to the wares found, for example, in Chester at the same date, where a variety of high quality English and imported ceramics have been found in excavations. These include Saintonge and Beauvais wares, lustrewares, Italian and Spanish wares.³² The Buckley potters continued to provide for the lower and middle ranks of society.

Designs and influences

The most common method of decoration in Buckley is by slip trailing in a contrasting colour directly on to the earthenware body of the pot. There are also some pieces which have been decorated in the sgraffito technique. This is produced by applying a slip coat over the whole of the pot and scratching a design through the leather-hard slip to reveal the contrasting body beneath. The decorated pieces of trailed slipware and sgraffito ware from Brookhill give us an insight into the minds of the seventeenth century potters. Everything is crudely drawn by hand (fig 8) but it is possible to suggest outside influences in these pieces. The potters took their wares to Chester market where they would have the opportunity to see everything available for sale, including wares imported from the Continent. One sherd of Beauvais sgraffito has been found on the production site at Brookhill.

Fig 8 Common design motifs on seventeenth century Buckley pottery

Influences in decorative styles on slipwares spread from east to west. In Northern Italy they were copying Middle Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean prototypes in the medieval period. The main centres were the Po valley and Liguria.³³ In the Saintonge region of South West France, very fine jugs were produced which were exported along the French coast, to other parts of Europe and to the British Isles.³⁴ By the fifteenth century, the Beauvais region of Northern France was producing slipwares and sgraffito ware in large quantities. These have been found throughout Britain and the Low Countries.³⁵ By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries an extensive slipware industry had developed in Northern Germany. These wares were exported through the port of Bremen in large quantities to the Low Countries, Scandinavia and Britain.³⁶

The earliest slipwares in Britain, using the sgraffito technique, were made at Nether Stowey in Somerset in the late sixteenth century.³⁷ By the early seventeenth century, 'Metropolitan slipware' with slip-trailed decoration was manufactured in Essex with its principal market being London and southern and eastern England. Another production centre was based at Wrotham in Kent.³⁸ By the 1640s, slipware was being produced in Staffordshire and North Wales and by the 1650s there were a number of centres of production, including West Yorkshire and South Lancashire.

The technique of sgraffito decoration had been adopted in North Devon by the early seventeenth century, heavily influenced by its trading links with the Low Countries. The North Devon industry was directed principally to export, the major routes being to Ireland, America and the coastal trade around the Irish Sea.³⁹ Donyatt in Somerset was also producing sgraffito ware by the early seventeenth century and slip-trailed designs from the mid seventeenth century, but it had a limited export market.⁴⁰ The only known site to produce early sgraffito wares in northern Britain is Buckley.

The slipware reaching Britain from Northern Europe clearly had an influence on the choice of decorative style in the British production centres. The most common themes are botanical, zoomorphic and geometric. For example, pieces produced in Donyatt in Somerset frequently show bird and tulip motifs. These design themes also appear on pieces produced in Buckley.⁴¹

Two sherds of North Devon sgraffito pottery were found on the Brookhill site. There is considerable documentary and artefactual evidence of North Devon sgraffito pottery reaching Chester and Liverpool,⁴² so it is likely that the pieces found in Buckley were traded through Chester market. The designs on North Devon ware come in two main categories, geometric and floral. The central motif often combines compass-drawn petals and geometric patterns and can be quite intricate.⁴³ Watkins considers that there is much circumstantial evidence to make a connection between North Devon sgraffito ware manufacture and design and the influx of Huguenot and Netherlands Protestant artisans into south and south-west England. Although some motifs seen on North Devon pieces are also found on Buckley pottery, the North Devon designs are not as crude as those from Buckley. Possibly the Welsh potters gained some inspiration for their decoration from North Devon pieces but that they chose to interpret them in their own way (fig 9).⁴⁴

Fig 9 North Devon sgraffito plate found during excavation at Sefton Old Hall, Merseyside

Other types of influences should not be ignored. The sophisticated designs and styles of the time were intended for the town and country house. There was a growing library of information available for anyone looking for design ideas. The pattern books produced for the silk weaving industry and for needlework provided a range of plant and animal designs. There were also pattern books for furniture decoration and for use in the kitchen. The range of motifs included flowers, tulips, leaves and birds. As well as the pattern books, objects themselves featuring popular designs would have been available in a place like Chester, with its thriving market and affluent society. Fine silks and embroidery, other textiles, furniture and household goods would have been accessible for anyone to see and purchase. Buckley pottery was traded regularly in the city, providing ample opportunity for Buckley folk to browse and possibly purchase items to take home.

During the mid-seventeenth century, the regional furniture of Lancashire and Cheshire features, in particular, designs of tulips, leaves and dragons, very similar to the Buckley images. Furniture craftsmen travelled around the country and could possibly have had some contact with Buckley. Documentary evidence suggests that potters moved between potting centres,⁴⁵ so it is more than likely that craftspeople in different trades had contact with each other. It is suggested that some of the floral motifs seen on Lancashire chairs are related to needlework designs.⁴⁶ Various needlework pattern books were published in the early seventeenth century detailing naturalistic motifs and other related designs.⁴⁷

Bestiary influence

There is an intriguing small group of sgraffito dishes from Brookhill Pottery that contain images of birds, worms, fish and elephants. Some of these dishes also contain a motto around the rim (fig 10).

Fig 10 White slip-coated dish with sgraffito design showing a bird and worm. Excavated from the kiln site at Brookhill Pottery

The source for these images and texts cannot be determined precisely, but it is possible that they derive from the medieval bestiary texts and illustrations.⁴⁸ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a resurgence of interest in the bestiaries and the earlier Latin texts were translated into English. The bestiaries are a collection of morality tales of animals, plants and fishes written to convey an understanding of the scriptures and the conduct of a good Christian.⁴⁹ They were a popular source for sermon writers. Good and evil were embodied in nature and all natural elements were segregated into those that had good properties and those that had bad properties.⁵⁰

In the medieval period, much of the population was illiterate so the use of images and icons were forms of a visual parable which created a direct means of communication.⁵¹ By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries more people could read and translations into English led to a wider contact with the bestiary tradition. This coincided with the growth of Puritanism in the country. It is not possible, within the scope of this paper, to research the bestiaries and sermons produced from them. However, it is likely that the religious leaders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries taught the Christian doctrine using the symbolism of good and evil contained in the bestiaries, as had been done in previous centuries. The entire text of a bestiary is heavy with biblical quotations. The first, literal section tends to include passages from the Old Testament, and the second section relates to the New Testament.⁵²

There are at least two vessels from Buckley depicting elephants, two that state 'elephant' in the motto and at least one mentioning a dragon in the text. Although no direct quote can be found for the mottoes, there are links to elephants and dragons in the bestiary texts. In the Christian moralizations, the elephant and the dragon symbolised good and evil. Illustrated is part of a dish that depicts the two legs and tail of an elephant with the text 'to sleep .gainst a tree ·it is t' (fig 11). A twelfth century manuscript, now in the Cambridge University Library, translated by White, reads as follows:

The elephant's nature is that if he tumbles down he cannot get up again. Hence it comes that he leans against a tree when he wants to go to sleep, for he has no joints in his knees.⁵³

Fig 11 Fragment of white slip-coated dish with sgraffito design depicting an elephant with the motto 'to sleep .gainst a tree .it is t'. Excavated from the kiln site at Brookhill Pottery

Another Buckley dish fragment shows four legs and tail of an elephant with the text 'to dea..s stonge: The Drgon' (fig 12). White's translation is as follows:

The dragon has a crest, a small mouth and a narrow gullet through which it draws breath or puts out its tongue. Moreover, its strength is not in its teeth but in its tail, and it inflicts injury by blows rather than by stinging. Even the elephant is not protected from it by the size of its body; for the dragon, lying in wait near the paths along which the elephants usually saunter, lassoes their legs in a knot with its tail and destroys them by suffocation.⁵⁴

Illuminated bestiaries are a peculiarly English phenomenon, reaching their peak at the beginning of the thirteenth century. A very fine illustration of an elephant and dragon appears in a manuscript (Bodley 764) discussed by Barber.⁵⁵ This shows clearly the dragon entwining itself around the elephant.

There may be as many as fourteen vessels from Buckley depicting birds, only one of which has a motto, which reads 'd throw and he is begyl' (fig 13). There are many birds featured in the bestiaries but it is quite impossible to link any particular one to the Buckley images.

An examination of the text around the rim of these dishes shows inconsistencies. Capital letters have been used for Dragon and Elephant on one dish. On another dish, elephant is written in lower case. The spelling of elephant appears in two different forms, one with and one without an 'h'. There are two versions of the word he - 'he' and 'hee'. It appears as if this text has been copied and not necessarily copied correctly. What was it copied from? It is almost certain that the source for these are the bestiary texts. To copy text does not necessarily mean that the potter was literate, which could explain the inconsistencies. Another possibility is that some texts were heard and repeated many times in church, much as we recite The Lord's Prayer today, and that the potters reiterated those parts they could remember, but how literate were they in Buckley at this date?

Another possibility is that these dishes were part of a special order, the details for the decoration being supplied for copying. To date, no pieces of these dishes have been found beyond the production site itself. This suggests that there was a very limited production, probably by one potter. All the pieces are from one kiln, the earliest kiln on the site, dated between 1640-1670. It is even possible that these dishes are the result of one firing by one potter.

Conclusion

Buckley potteries, just like other rural pottery industries in the seventeenth century, developed because of the availability of natural resources and the changes in cooking, eating and drinking fashions of the time. The local market in Chester is the likely source of much of their design ideas, both from the sophisticated ceramics available for the wealthy citizens of Chester, including imported wares from the Continent, but also from other materials such as furniture and textiles and the availability of pattern books.

The potters created their own versions of what they had seen to supply their local market. Although the designs appear crude, they are appealing and follow the fashions of the time to serve the peasant population. The market for their wares was very local and at the lower end of the social scale, therefore the need to provide highly sophisticated designs was not necessary. The fact that some pieces were decorated would be sufficient to satisfy the demand for more expensive-looking items from their customers who wished to follow the latest fashions but could not afford to purchase high quality goods.

The sgraffito pieces with mottoes and bestiary images appear to be unique. These images only appear on Buckley dishes. The closest parallels to the Buckley pieces are the North Devon sgraffito wares but their designs are distinctively different from the Buckley pieces. North Devon wares have no images or text which relate to the bestiaries. Most North Devon pieces at this time are without text and their designs are carefully executed. The few that do contain text have either something in verse or simple initials on commemorative pieces.

The early established potting centres such as Donyatt, North Devon and Buckley maintained their own distinctive styles of coarse earthenware production throughout the 18 th and 19 th centuries.⁵⁶ Buckley focussed on producing plain earthenwares for use in the kitchen and dairy and also made industrial products.⁵⁷ The continued use of birds, animals, plants and inscriptions is seen in particular on the harvest jugs of North Devon, which are often very elaborate and inscribed with the recipients' name.⁵⁸

Christine Longworth is Curator of British and European Antiquities at Liverpool Museum. The author would welcome any report of Buckley sgraffito ware finds.

Bibliography

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Notes

1 Christopher Dyer, 'The Social and Economic Changes of the Later Middle Ages, and the Pottery of the Period', Medieval Ceramics , vol.6, 1982, pp.33-42, p.37.

2 Jean Le Patourel, ' Potters and Pots', Medieval Ceramics , vol.10, 1986, pp.3-16, p.3.

3 Jean Le Patourel, 'Documentary Evidence and the Medieval Pottery Industry', Medieval Archaeology, vol.12, 1968, pp.101-126, p.102.

4 Le Patourel, 'Documentary Evidence', p.103.

5 Dyer, 'Social and Economic Changes', p.37.

6 J. Birrell, 'Peasant Craftsmen in the Medieval Forest', Agricultural History Review , vol.17, 1969, pp.91-107.

7 Dean E. Arnold, Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process , Cambridge University Press, 1985, p.199.

8 Le Patourel, 'Documentary Evidence', p. 103.

9 Ibid.

10 Dyer, 'Social and Economic Changes', p.37.

11 Michael McCarthy and Catherine Brooks, Medieval Pottery in Britain AD 900-1600, Leicester University Press, 1988, p.55.

12 Peter Brears, The English Country Pottery , Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1971, p.13.

13 D. Gaimster and B. Nenk, 'English Households in Transition c1450-1550: The Ceramic Evidence', The Age of Transition: the Archaeology of English Culture 1400-1600, Oxford, Oxbow Books, 1997, p.171.

14 Andrew McGarva, Country Pottery: Traditional Earthenware of Britain , London, A & C Black, 2000, p.9.

15 Brears, English Country Pottery, p.14.

16 Brears, English Country Pottery, p.14; Stephen Moorhouse and Ian Roberts, Wrenthorpe Potteries, Bradford, West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, 1992, p.4.

17 Peter Davey, 'Merseyside: The Post-Roman Pottery', Journal of the Merseyside Archaeological Society, vol. 7, 1991, pp.121-142, p.127.

18 B. Smith and T.N. George, British Regional Geology: North Wales , London, HMSO, 1961, p.73.

19 Flintshire Record Office, Gwysaney, 96/3.

20 J.E. Messham, 'The Buckley Potteries', Flintshire Historical Society Publications , vol. 16, 1956, pp.58-59.

21 Peter Davey, 'Recent Fieldwork in the Buckley Potteries', Journal of the Buckley Society , no. 4, April 1976, pp.16-29.

22 Le Patourel, 'Documentary Evidence', p.11.3

23 Messham, 'The Buckley Potteries', p.32.

24 Ibid p.33.

25 Ibid pp.56-59.

26 Ibid p.56.

27 A. Amery and P.J. Davey, 'Post-Medieval Pottery from Brookhill, Buckley, Clwyd

(Site 1)', Medieval and Later Pottery in Wales, 2, 1979, pp.49-85; K. Lloyd Gruffydd, 'Seventeenth-Century Bestiary Ware from Buckley, Clwyd', Archaeologia Cambrensis , 129, 1980, pp.160-163; D.A. Higgins, 'Clay Tobacco Pipes from Brookhill, Buckley', Medieval and Later Pottery in Wales, 6, 1983, pp.50-64; D.A. Higgins, 'More Pipes from the Bentley Collection, Buckley, Clwyd', Society of Clay Pipe Research Newsletter 46, 1995, pp.9-13; Christine Longworth, 'Buckley Sgraffito: A study of a 17 th Century Pottery Industry in North Wales, its Production Techniques and Design Influences', Internet Archaeology , no.16, 2004, http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue16/longworth_toc.html

28 Brears, English Country Pottery , p.13.

29 McCarthy and Brooks, Medieval Pottery, p.56.

30 Dyer, 'Social and Economic Changes', p.40.

31 McCarthy and Brooks, Medieval Pottery, p.90.

32 Pers. com. Julie Edwards, Chester Archaeology.

33 J.G.H. Hurst, D.S. Neal and H.J.E. van Beuningen, Pottery Produced and Traded in North-West Europe 1350-1650, Rotterdam Papers VII, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1986, p.30.

34 Jean Chapelot, 'The Saintonge Pottery Industry in the Later Middle Ages' in P.J. Davey and R. Hodges Ceramics and Trade, Sheffield: Department of Prehistory and Archaeology, University of Sheffield, 1983, p. 51.

35 Hurst et al, Pottery in North-West Europe, p. 108.

36 Ibid p. 242.

37 David Barker, Slipware , Shire Publications, 1993, p. 8.

38 Ibid pp. 11-13.

39 A. Grant, North Devon Pottery: The Seventeenth Century, University of Exeter, 1983, p.93; C.M. Watkins, 'North Devon Pottery and its Export to America in the 17 th century', Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology, United States National Museum Bulletin, 225, 1960, p. 53.

40 R. Coleman-Smith and T. Pearson, Excavations in the Donyatt Potteries , Phillimore & Co.Ltd, 1982.

41 Longworth, 'Buckley Sgraffito' , Internet Archaeology, no.16, 6.3 History of the Development of Designs and Patterns - Designs Using Plants and Animals.http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue16/1/ch6.31.html.

42 P.J. Davey, 'Slipwares', in Excavations in South Castle Street, Liverpool 1976 and 1977 , Journal of the Merseyside Archaeological Society, 4, 1985, p.33; Davey, 'Merseyside: the Post-Roman pottery', p.136; P.J. Davey and J.A. Rutter, 'A Note on Continental Imports in the North-West 800-1700 AD', Medieval Ceramics, 1, 1977, p.28; Grant, North Devon Pottery , p.93.

43 Watkins, 'North Devon Pottery', p.43.

44 Longworth, 'Buckley Sgraffito', Internet Archaeology, no.16, 7.4 Spread of Influences - Decorative Styles and Vessel Forms.http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue16/1/ch7.43.html.

45 Moorhouse and Roberts, Wrenthorpe Potteries , p.110.

46 Temple Newsam, Oak Furniture from Lancashire and the Lake District , 1973, Exhibition catalogue, Leeds, figs 21 and 22.

47 Connoisseur Period Guides: The Stuart Period 1603-1714 , London, 1957, p.127.

48 Lloyd Gruffydd, 'Seventeenth-Century Bestiary Ware', p.160; Longworth, 'Buckley Sgraffito', Internet Archaeology, no.16, 6.3 History of the Development of Designs and Patterns - Bestiaries.http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue16/1/ch6.34.html.

49 John Williamson, The Oak King, the Holly King and the Unicorn, New York, Harper and Row, 1986, p.49.

50 Ibid p.41.

51 Ibid p.42.

52 R. Baxter, Bestiaries and their Users in the Middle Ages , Stroud, Sutton Publishing Limited, 1998, p.33.

53 T.H. White, The Book of Beasts , London, Jonathan Cape, 1969, p.26.

54 White, Book of Beasts, p.166.

55 Richard Barber, Bestiary, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1999, p.182.

56 Barker, Slipware , p. 20.

57 Peter Davey, Buckley Pottery, Buckley Clay Industries Research Committee, 1975, p. 2.

58 Mary Wondrausch, Mary Wondrausch on Slipware, London, A & C Black (Publishers) Ltd, 1986, p. 61.

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